sola gracia

Finally having kids is paying off.
We are willing t o loan him out for simple house cleaning. His hourly rate is $40/hr. Don’t call Child Services. Thanks.

Despite the amount of grief that everyone gives Microsoft, it seems that they continue to persevere in designing products that work well together. They may not play well with everything else, but they usually work well with their own family of products namely Office. Enter Office 2007. I downloaded it tonight to play around with it on a test PC and I’m pleasantly surprised at how much I like it. With a Beta 2 we can usually expect some pretty polished products but this is has all the extra polish that you might expect from a RTM. Here is the catch; it plays well with others (notwithstanding Open Document format). I noticed the blogging feature from within 2007 which allows me to make posts onto WordPress through Word. I guess this is where we are finally starting to see the early work of XML coming to fruition. The menus in the new Word are very nice and we have been hearing a lot about these. The other pleasant surprise was that my picture output was by default in png. Does this mean we have .png support in IE7? Along with the standard MSN Spaces and Blogger support there is a support for basically whatever you have rolled up those posts in Atom or MetaWebLog formats. The Blogger support was nice to see (hope this doesn’t squash any upcoming Yahoo! deals, last time I checked Blogger was owned by Google) as well as Microsoft’s flexibility to give us the option to choose our blog software. Edit: I just noticed that you can also..edit..existing posts. How handy is that?

The last couple of days the sunshine has been beating the music out of my head. These are some random great tracks that keep the sunshine in the groove. Bwah!

Cat Empire – Sol y Sombra
Ben Folds Five – She Don’t Use Jelly (Flaming Lips)
Ray Lamontagne – Crazy (Gnarls Barkley)
Pheonix – Everything Is Everything
Ghostland Observatory – Ghetto Magnet

If you enjoy the music then buy the albums. These have only been posted for sampling purposes and will be removed soon. Don’t sue me. Thanks!

Google released their online calendaring service today. What a relief to see they support the iCal format. I remembered when MSN released their calendar for Hotmail. You’d think will all the money that Microsoft has they would come out with something great, but it was very slow and difficult to use. Its not very usable if you have to wait 15 between pages to add events. If you click on advanced it took another 15 seconds for it to load. Maybe this Google calendar will give them some motivation to make something better. For a consumer this is the best free calendaring I have seen yet. If someone writes a connector for Exchange (VCalendar) to iCal this could be a plausible corporate tool as well. Here is the link : http://www.google.com/calendar/

This is a reprise of the old Rauthe vs. Veyna from oh… I can’t remember…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TecW3f13C5o

For the n-billionth time we have added new photo gallery to the site. After starting to use Flickr there was not a lot of options for galleries and now there is. We are using this great photo plugin called FAlbum by the kind folks at RandomByte. Here is the address of our new photo gallery:

On to the albums….